Monday, August 10, 2009

This Is Not Right, Your New Magic

Much of magic is sourced in the manipulation of attention. I actually believe in this way there is no difference between life and magic. Some of magic is the control of powers. In this way too there is no difference between life and magic.

This Is Not Right

I got distractedjust for the one spare momentand when I turned backit had all been changed.

I do not know how that allhappened, like a knife.

I don't know how toget it back the way it was.Why am I the same?

February 3, 2009 8:29 PM

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Some difficulties arise in associating with a magician. Here is one.

Your New Magic

I looked at myselfin your mirror. Some kind ofweird bird looked at me.This backs me up some,like I come to your new houseonly to discoverI have changed my shapeto do it or worse, you havedone it with your newmagic.

11 comments:

The uncanniness of arriving somewhere new but being the same. I don't think I like that. I think I'd much rather arrive changed. Every journey should grant a changing imprint, even if only in the slight of hand.

However, I firmly like to be in control of my transformations, or at least party to the shift. I shouldn't like to become something new by surprise or someone else's doing.

I get distractedFor a fleeting momentAnd turning backDiscover I am not the same.

How did thishappen, hey-presto!?

How do I find my wayback to who I was?Why did I change?~~~~~I took liberties, sir, for which I hope I may be forgiven. I once wrote, long ago, about turning inward and losing time - sometimes weeks - before I found my way out again, bewildered...and this reminded me of that...struck a chord...and I felt like writing something with your words, juggling them, looking at them from another perspective, taste them with a different salt.

hmmmm, maybe i didn't quite get it, but i do like experiences like that, where suddenly everything changes and i somehow am the sameor in the next poem the other way around. Very liberating in a way, to be a strange bird after all. :)Love the way you write it.

Erin, me too. I long ago figured out that I am okay with change when it's me that's doing it, but really dislike change when I am not in control. Actually, to be painfully honest, I dislike responsibility too, and so really what I like are the changes that let me pretend I control so I can look like a person in control, but that really takes me for a ride. Heh.

Kyddryn, you are welcome to do that poetizing here any time you choose. I like that.

Jozien, the Brits sometimes have called women birds but they don't mean shape changing. In the States some matrons are hens or crows, but that usually is meant sort of as a small insult. Older guys are sometime buzzards. I know there are more.

Since time is mysterious, you think you look away for a second but it may have been much longer in earth time. We all get distracted, darn it, we are only human.The second poem I cannot do. I cannot look into my own mirror, much less anyone else's. You are braver than I am.

I think the only sure thing is that things will change. Of course, there's a comfort in sameness, but change certainly keeps you on your toes! New magic - that's a nice way to think of it. I like this, Christopher.

Both poems really spoke to me, Christopher, but especially 'This Is Not Right,' which captured so well a familiar sensation.

I don't know why different people have such different reactions to change ~ it terrifies some, unsettles others and is often simply accepted by still others. I'd like to consider myself in that last category, but sometimes change catches me by surprise and that's when I really feel 'this is not right.'

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.